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Thread: Back from the Panama Canal

  1. #1
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    Back from the Panama Canal

    Well, the chickens are back....roosting in our RV and getting ready to wander off into the AZ desert for a few months in a week or so.

    We did a Princess 14 day cruise (our first cruise), from Los Angeles, down thru the Panama Canal, ending up in Ft. Lauderdale FL, with stops in Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia and Aruba beside the day long transit of the Canal.....WHAT a great trip it was! Then spent a few days in Miami before flying back to where our rig was parked in CA.

    We both read historian, David McCullough's Path Between the Seas on the way down to the Canal, while transiting and afterward, which gave us an in depth appreciation for the truly stupendous engineering accomplishment it represents.

    Although, our "carbon footprint" for 2011 probably gave us not only a lifetime high, but probably was more than our carbon footprint for the past twenty years.

    The fee for the Coral Princess to transit the Canal (a process that takes about 9-10 hours), was $385,000. But the captain said that in case we thought that excessive, we should remember that it actually SAVED more than half a million dollars, because the ship would have burned an additional $800,000 worth of diesel fuel going the long way around South America. Which makes my head spin as I think of how much fuel was spent going the 5,000 miles we DID go.........

    When I think that this particular ship makes this trip two times a month for at least half the year, and is only one of a large number of other cruise ships doing the same thing, surely we are doomed in the global warming department.....

    SO......feeling guilty for being a part of such waste, but admitting that the trip was wonderful, the food was amazing (every morsel cooked from scratch, and 40 pastry chefs alone on the ship), and we really enjoyed it. My 70th birthday was so painless, since I was having such a great time, that I hardly noticed that I had sailed into my 70s......

    Nice to be back......if any of you have the chance to go through the Panama Canal, you won't be disappointed. It really was an experience of a lifetime.

    Although as I look at the huge number of threads unread.........will take me quite a while to catch up here on the Simple Living boards.......

  2. #2
    Mrs-M
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    Really great to hear from you, LC! I can't get the "40 pastry chefs" out of my mind! (I know you mentioned that just to make all of us sweet-feens jealous)!

    Most happy to have you back! P.S. Those are amazing dollar and cents figures related to the canal. Incredible.

  3. #3
    Senior Member Tradd's Avatar
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    LC, you might be interested in this:

    Finished in 1900, the flow of the Chicago River was permanently reversed, to flow backwards. It was a massive engineering feat for the time. Why I'm bringing this up is that some of the techniques used on the Chicago River reversal were later used on the Panama Canal project.

    http://www2.apwa.net/about/awards/to...tury/chica.htm

  4. #4
    Senior Member Greg44's Avatar
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    As I read this to my dw, we both just said WOW! What a great experience...and I too thought 40 pastry chefs, everything from scratch!

    I had no idea it cost so much to move a ship through the passage.

    Glad to hear you had a great trip.

  5. #5
    Senior Member CathyA's Avatar
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    Nice to have you back LC! Sounds like a trip of a lifetime. You'll have to tell us about some of the things you saw!

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    Senior Member razz's Avatar
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    Sounds wonderful and thanks for telling us about it all. A friend of mine was down there when she was about 5 or so with her family doing some major maintenance with her dad being employed as an electrician, I think. She made the trip back to see what had changed in about 50 years and raved about the experience as well.

  7. #7
    Senior Member gimmethesimplelife's Avatar
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    Cool to hear from you! I kid you not, I was debating posting a thread along the lines of Calling Loose Chickens.....Good to see you back here and glad you had some adventures!

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    One thing at least about the Canal......all the electricity to run everything.......it ALL runs on electricity, the gates, the little locomotives that control the ships in the locks, etc., are powered with renewable energy, a hydroelectric plant at the dam of the Chagres River that supplies not only the water to operate the locks, many millions of gallons per ship, but all the electricity.

    About the pastry chefs.....we did the Ultimate Ship Tour (four and a half hours touring everything "backstage" about the cruise ship, from kitchens to laundry to control room, anchor storage, print shop, housekeeping, the bridge, etc.), so spent about an hour in the kitchens and food storage areas.

    We watched them making croissants. First they started with the dough, rolled about an inch thick and maybe 18 x 24 inch rectangle. THEN, they took this huge slab of a package of Challenge butter, about an inch thick and maybe 12 x 18, probably about five pounds of butter, and put it down on the dough and folded the edges over the butter. Then it went into this machine that stretched it and folded it, which was done a number of times until all that butter had "become one with" the dough. Then they formed the croissants.....no wonder they tasted so good......

    More than 200 crew members work in the kitchens, 40 of them on breads and pastries alone. They provision the ship every two weeks, in Ft. Lauderdale and in Los Angeles, the two ends of the Panama Canal cruise. The grocery list alone runs 65 pages, and all the fruits and vegetables are fresh, nothing canned or frozen. They feed about 2,000 passengers and about 1,000 crew members.

    Just seeing all the "behind the scenes" stuff was almost as interesting as transiting the Canal itself. They only do two Ultimate Ship Tours per trip, of a dozen people each, so you have to be one of the first people on board and sign up immediately upon arrival on the ship to be able to do it. It was expensive to do, but they gave each participant a brand new chef's coat and a really nice, heavy terry cloth robe with the Princess logo on it, as well as a portfolio of pictures of the group, taken by the ship's photographer, to document the visit, since we were not allowed to take photographs ourselves. Seeing how this operation, which looks so effortless on the surface, really was an amazing organization of many hundred people working hard behind the scenes was a real highlight of the trip.

    (I think they charge so much, $150 per person, for the ship tour because they want to offer it for the people who are seriously interested, but depress the numbers of people who aren't, because it took a lot of time away from work for the heads of the kitchens, housekeeping, officers on the bridge, etc., who showed us around and spent a lot of time answering questions). We spent over 45 minutes with the ship's captain on the bridge, had the whole operation of the ship explained, all the electronics, got to watch a whole bunch of dolphins frolicking in the waves just in front of the ship, with the tour culminating with champagne, canapes and exquisite little pastries with the captain in his private dining room behind the bridge. We started the tour at 8 a.m. and didn't finish until after 12:30 p.m.

    Greg44......the fees to transit the Canal are set by a complicated formula involving tonnage, and number of "souls on board" for passenger ships. I was flabbergasted myself at the cost....I had no idea it cost that much, myself.

    Neat link, Tradd.......
    Last edited by loosechickens; 1-9-12 at 2:37am.

  9. #9
    Senior Member flowerseverywhere's Avatar
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    You know your post makes me think this is what it is all about. You spend years living frugally, pinching pennies, not wasting anything so when times like this come along -life experiences- you can afford to do them. Anyway that is how I view my life.

    Great you had such an interesting time. Welcome "home"

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    exactly, flowerseverywhere.....although we did feel major concerns about all the "wretched excess" of something like a cruise vacation.......

    interesting, also......how we financed this trip was, we keep track of every penny of income and expense, and have since 1992, accounting for everything just as if our little family economy was a business keeping records. Because of that, it was easy for us to set up an accounting page, which we called "Windfalls", and on that page, we entered every cent of income that came in that was not part of our ordinary income that comes from investments and my Social Security check. Such things as birthday or Christmas money presents went in there, as did any incidental income, such as the stuff I do for fun on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, rebates, bits and pieces of income from free lance magazine articles, a couple of magazine cover photos for RVing magazines that my sweetie sold, etc.

    We started the "Windfalls" account because we were having so much trouble ever spending any money on frivolous things. The habit of saving and investment, and living very frugally had become such an ingrained habit with both of us, that we just weren't able to change gears and recognize that the time that we had saved for, for so many years, had actually arrived, and now we were supposed to enjoy some of the fruits of our labors in our retirement. So we started this little fund specifically to provide money for frivolous expenses.

    BUT....even with the windfall account balance continuing to accrue, we seldom spent any of it. Finally, this year, the total was over $6,000, my 70th birthday was coming up, we wanted to do something really special, so we decided to blow pretty much the whole amount (there is still $316 in the account, hahahaha) in an explosion of frivolity.

    It was fun. It was really fun. I'm hoping that this experience will help us loosen up a bit and do more frivolous things. Maybe not something that major, but we're both hoping that this "spending experience" will kind of break that logjam we've had of finding it easy to save, but hard to spend, so that we can enjoy some of this money we've accumulated.

    It's been interesting, seeing all the emotions that have come up around this spending of money in a frivolous way. It's certainly something that doesn't come easy to us, but after this experience, seeing how much fun we had, maybe the next "splurge" will be easier. But I think it will be awhile....we're ready for some frugality for a bit, I think.

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